Design Tips, Content Management

[albertfreestyle]

Hi:
I am preparing to design a site for a friend who wants to do all the updates himself (along with a few others within the orgainization)...

I have heard of Mambo and Contribute and a few others, but since these guys do not have any of this, I was wondering if any of you had any ideas on how I should design this site - to make it easy enough for them to do updates themselves without screwing up the design code.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

The site is going to be very large (like 70-100 pages)
I will be doing the headers (and navigation) in flash and the rest of the content will be in HTML...So it will be half flash - half html...

Thanks again.

 

[CanadaRAM]

You can put the body-text content of the pages they want to be updating, into TXT files, and then use Server Side Includes to place them into the HTML

The client would have access to the "EditableIncludes" folder, and could update the text with fundamental knowledge of FTP and basic HTML grammar.

They could of course %*#* up the content, but it wouldn't prang the page itself or the navigation.

The site is going to be very large (like 70-100 pages)

Young puppy! 100 pages - Hah!

 

[frankblundt]

If there's an easy/free solution to client content management, I'd love to hear it.

AFAIK they're either going to have to learn HTML or spend money or use a lot of your time.

You can set it up so that they have FTP access to the site and either download and edit separate "content" documents like C'Ram said, or the page files directly, then upload them. This means they have to know enough HTML to find the content or tag the text they put in. For most people I deal with, this is asking far too much of them.

Contribute allows you as the admin to define editable portions of pages that they can then browse to just like on the normal site and edit in a WYSIWYG editor. It works pretty well but is about $150.

Or you can use PHP&MySQL (or the like) to build an admin backend for the site that will allow them to manipulate the content on-line (much like Contribute). This is not in essence difficult, but time consuming to set up.

Mambo and the other open-source CMS will provide you with the admin tools free, but can be painful to configure and get looking the way you want them to.

 

[albertfreestyle]

If there's an easy/free solution to client content management, I'd love to hear it.

AFAIK they're either going to have to learn HTML or spend money or use a lot of your time.

You can set it up so that they have FTP access to the site and either download and edit separate "content" documents like C'Ram said, or the page files directly, then upload them. This means they have to know enough HTML to find the content or tag the text they put in. For most people I deal with, this is asking far too much of them.

Contribute allows you as the admin to define editable portions of pages that they can then browse to just like on the normal site and edit in a WYSIWYG editor. It works pretty well but is about $150.

Or you can use PHP&MySQL (or the like) to build an admin backend for the site that will allow them to manipulate the content on-line (much like Contribute). This is not in essence difficult, but time consuming to set up.

Mambo and the other open-source CMS will provide you with the admin tools free, but can be painful to configure and get looking the way you want them to.

Right, I have seen the Mambo app and talked with people who say its a pain in the @#$ to setup. But who knows...

On the other hand, I have also read about contribute on adobe's website but have never seen it...or messed with it...So I'm not real confident trying to deliver a product and learn a new app, then make sure they have it, and teach (non-web) people to use it.

I think the SSI would not be a bad idea entirely, I did some contracting work for a design firm about a year ago and was modifying SSI files along with making changes to dreamweaver template files...and this is a method I am fairly comfortable with, and feel the guys updating content would not have a prob editing these files...(txt docs)...my only concern is, where do i start?!?! haha

I guess it will be a trial an error session unless you guys know of any site I can get a quick crash course, or even take a look at source codes. Thanks again.

 

[frankblundt]

Crash course in SSI

As to Contribute - the beauty of it is you don't have to set up anything. As long as the page is straight HTML, you can edit it. The program itself works just like a web browser but with an edit button and text formatting tools. There's a free 30 day trial you can test on any site you have FTP access to. ...and no I'm not a schill for Adobe, but it's been a good solution for some other developers I've worked with and I'm getting one of my clients to give it a go to see if it's really workable for non-webheads.